Remember how awesome the video store was? MVD sure does and their Rewind Collection series is here to celebrate “cult classics and more from the video store” with blu ray and DVD collector’s sets loaded with special features. Many of the films in this series — which are numbered and come in a slipcase that looks like an actual beat up rental box — haven’t been released on blu ray in North America and some have never even been released on DVD!

The first MVD Rewind release I’ve had the chance to watch is 1988’s Bram Stoker’s Shadowbuilder. It’s all about an evil archbishop and his followers who have brought a demon to our world with the hopes of destroying it. It’s able to turn anything to shadows which fade away in the light, but that very same demon is also afraid of light. Yet with each kill, it grows stronger and harder to kill, as well as gaining the power to control dogs.

Now, the demon has a young boy in its crosshairs, as that child has the potential to be a saint. Killing him will open the doorway to Hell and allow more demons loose into our realm of existence. Luckily, a renegade priest named Jacob Vassey (Michael Rooker from Guardians of the Galaxy, but I’m certain readers of this site can name many other films he’s been in) is ready to battle the Shadowbuilder. And hey! There’s Tony Todd with long hair and an eye patch (he’s also amazing in the making of feature, with every word out of his mouth sounding like poetry)! There’s also a really interesting section where actor Andrew Jackson, who played the Shadowbuilder, talks about how the voice of the villain came to be.

I’m certain that in 1988, having the Catholic Church be the bad guys felt pretty edgy. But today? I think today we can all accept that they’re probably housing Shadowbuilders. Also, if you’re guessing that this story has little to do with the original story, then you were renting movies in the 1980’s too! That said, the making of feature explains exactly how the original tale inspired it, including writer Michael Stokes, who has gone on to write for the kid’s show Paw Patrol!

Director Jamie Dixon keeps things moving. He only has one other directing credit to his name, the TV movie Bats: Human Harvest. However, he’s been the visual effects supervisor for films such as Prometheus, The Chronicles of Riddick, Titanic and so many more.

Beyond the great packaging (complete with poster and reversible artwork) and 1080p transfer, MVD really brings it here with the special features, including commentary from the director and features like its visual effects, child star Kevin Zegers, who was also in the Air Bud series and The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, and the aforementioned making of the film.

Diabolik DVD has this release as well as the entire MVD catalog. This was just released on August 28, so hurry and grab it today! It hits all the buttons here — Michael Rooker, occult horror, killer dogs, a cool looking bad guy…it’s as if it was made for this site!

Disclaimer: I was sent this movie by its PR team, but as you know, that has no bearing on my review.

Any movie that refers to its titular monster as the “critter from the shitter,” you know what you’re getting into. Oh, Italian cinema. I love you so.

Marlis and Peggy are modeling on a Caribbean Island when Peggy gets eaten by rats. You know. The kind of thing that happens every time they shoot the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover.

Peggy’s sister Terry (Janet Ågren, City of the Living Dead, Eaten Alive!) shows up to investigate along with Fred (David Warbeck, The Beyond). They learn that the real culprit is a two-foot tall ape/rat hybrid, which is something out of Alex Jones’ worst nightmares. And yours and mine as well, as it’s played by Nelson de la Rosa, who you may also remember as Marlon Brando’s miniature twin in The Island of Dr. Moreau. His attacks are filled with screaming rat noises and really seem like harrowing moments to have filmed.

Shockingly, this movie is directed by Giuliano Carnimeo, whose Case of the Bloody Iris is one of my favorite giallo films! It’s written by Dardano Sacchetti, who of course helped create The Beyond, The New York Ripper, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, The Church and so many other Italian genre favorites. Dardano, thank you for all the complete lunacy and demented fun that you have brought into our lives!

The end of this film is a joy. A shocker that will surprise you with just how effective Italian genre filmmaking can be. It made me howl in abject joy!

Shameless put out a region 2 DVD a few years ago, which you can find here but the American version from Apprehensive Films is out of stock. Hint: You can find this one on YouTube.

I love George Kennedy and want to state for the record that he deserved way better than this film, which is a total piece of shit. That said, I’ve proved time and again that my favorite movies to watch are mostly made out of fecal matter, so let’s dish.

Genetic Laboratories has decided to create a poisonous mutant cat that lives inside the body of a cute house cat. Why would they do this? Who knows, but it’s a good thing they did, or we wouldn’t have a movie.

The cat ends up on the yacht of “Wall Street” Walter Graham (Alex Cord, Michael Coldsmith Briggs III of TV’s Airwolf), who is running away to the Cayman Islands to escape the SEC. Along the way, he’s brought his bodyguard (Kennedy) and a bunch of hot girls and their boyfriends. Holy shit, there’s Clu Gulager, Burt from Return of the Living Dead! There’s Austin Stoker (Assault on Precinct 13, Horror High, Battle for the Planet of the Apes)! And Rob Estes from USA’s Silk Stalkings!

This Japanese box art should tell you all that you need to know:

Or perhaps you’d like to see the German artwork:

The Uninvited was written and directed by Greydon Clark, who also directed Joysticks, Wacko and Satan’s Cheerleaders. I would hope that any of those films are better than this. Becca looked at a photo from this movie and said, “Is that a stuffed animal?” Yes, it is. That’s the level of special effects you’ll see here.

There’s also George Kennedy getting bitten by a demonic cat. If that doesn’t make you want to watch this, I don’t know what will. You can watch it on Amazon Prime or grab it for $4 from Cheezy Flicks.

Eddie and his family have just inherited a frightening house that was built over the doorway to Hell. And then Eddie finds out that he has another inheritance: the title of the evil master of the world. What would you do if you finally had all the power you ever craved?

A sequel in name, if not story, to Saturday the 14th, the Baxter family is the focus here. You have the dad, Frank (Avery Schreiber, who was in a ton of Doritos commercials, but he was also Russian coach Markov in The Concorde…Airport ’79, one of my all-time favorite horrible movies), mom Kate (Patty McCormack…do I have to tell you that she was in The Bad Seed?), sister Julie (Julianne McNamara, who before she started acting won the U.S. women’s first individual event gold medal in Olympic history for the uneven bars) and the aforementioned Eddie (Jason Presson, The Lady in White). Oh yeah! I forgot that grandpa lives there and he’s played by Ray Walston.

The Evil One wants Eddie to embrace his power and introduces him to an entire family of monsters, including Michael Berryman as a mummy! Oh yeah, I almost forgot! Grandpa’s pal Leonard is played by Phil Leads, the character actor who played Doctor Shand in Rosemary’s Baby.

The end of the movie is a cavalcade of past Corman productions, including the guitar and part of the body of Joey Ramone. This is a mess, a movie that was cobbled together to cash in on the video store success of the original. Yet I find parts of it charming and perhaps I was in the right mood to enjoy it when I did.

If you want to see it for yourself, you can get the DVD for a decent price on Amazon.

Look at that Boris Vallejo poster! Between that and Persis Khambatta (Megaforce), this seemed like one of those movies I had to see. Even better, it’s alternate title, Phoenix the Warrior, is awesome!

Starring Kathleen Kinmont as Phoenix (she’s also Kelly Meeker in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers) and Khambatta as the evil Cobalt, this film is all about a pregnant woman who gives birth to one of the few men on earth. There’s also a Reverend Mother who is in control of all the sperm and has a religious hold over all of the women.

Oh yeah — there are also the Rezules, who worship television. How awesome would it be that if instead of zombies, they were dressed up like characters from famous TV shows? Archie Bunker ruling the Badlands of the end times? This movie could have made that happen.

When I was a kid, I wrote a comic book called Cola War (get it, Cold War?) where there was no water so everyone only consumed soda and religiously followed the soda that they drank. It was a great idea until someone explained to me that to create soda, you needed water. None of that logical thinking was applied to this movie.

That’s one of the downsides to watching so many movies. You get yourself excited and then, the chase is, as Lemmy taught us all, often so much better than the catch.

You can catch this on Amazon Prime. For a film packed with naked women and lesbian religious gangs, you kind of wish that it was a lot more entertaining. Well, you can’t get everything, I guess.

Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi, our friends who brought Troll 2 to life, were the writing team behind this, setting the film in the Philippines as a cheap and convenient locale. Lucio Fulci claimed that the script was dreadful and that he tried to rewrite most of it, whereas the producers would contend that Fulci’s initial cut was a little over an hour yet felt much longer than that. They got Fragasso and Bruno Mattei to finish things up. And we’re left to watch the results.

There’s this formula called Death One, which brings back the dead. Why anyone would want to create this for the army is beyond me. But Dr. Holder realizes that this is all just a bad idea, so he resigns. As he goes to surrender his findings, criminals attack (if this movie starts to remind you of Nightmare City, you aren’t alone) and run away with Death One.

That criminal gets infected and even cutting off his own hand — oh that Fulci — can’t stop the outbreak. The hotel he ran to is condemned and General Morton orders everyone there killed and the criminal’s remains burned by his two right-hand men (played, of course, by Mattei and Fragasso).  But just like Return of the Living Dead, the ashes in the air just make things worse. The birds are infected and begin to spread the disease.

What follows is a group of victims gets introduced to us and one after another, they are wiped out with pure malice and utter glee. There are some American GI’s who mention how horny rock and roll music makes them and the girls on the bus they hook up with. There’s a tourist couple, too. No one will be spared when Death One achieves its full power.

Everyone heads to the now abandoned resort and is shocked to find so many weapons. As they are killed off, Dr. Holden looks for a cure while General Morton works on killing off every single person and animal he can find.

Soon, only five of our heroes — Kenny, Roger, Patricia, Nancy, and Joe — are still alive. As soon as I wrote this down, the soldiers kill Joe. Our survivors make their way to a hospital, where Nancy tries to help a woman deliver a baby — bad news, zombie baby — and gets killed. This scene is packed with the gore that you had hoped that this film would bring. Don’t eat while watching, trust me.

Who lives? Who dies? You should just buy this and watch it, right? Right. I will say that I loved Blue Heart, the DJ who talks throughout the film and adored how he keeps doing it even after he joins the ranks of the undead. It reminds me a lot of the DJ as narrator scenes in The New York Ripper.

I almost forgot! There’s an awesome scene where a zombie skull flies out of the freezer and attacks. It wasn’t in the script but instead came from Fulci. He would go on to say that it was one of the most clever things he had come up with and the only thing about this film that he was proud of.

If you’re hoping for the follow-up to Zombi, this isn’t it. It’s still fun and the last twenty minutes or so really pick up. I’d love to see what happens if they ever did a sequel to this.

Severin has released what will probably forever be the ultimate version of this movie, packed with interviews. You’ll hear from just about everyone, including Fragasso, Drudi, Mattei and several of the actors and crew. There’s a big bundle as well if you get this along with Zombi 4 and Shocking Dark. It’s well worth it — this is one company that knows how to make the most out of everything they release.

In the 90’s, there were two Julie Browns on one channel. MTV. One was the wubba wubba wubba fashionista. The other was a wild redhead who sang songs like “Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun.” One guess which one we preferred?

Written by Brown (along with frequent collaborator Charlie Coffey and Terrence McNally) and directed by Julian Temple (a groundbreaking video director who also was in the chair for The Great Rock ‘n Roll Swindle with the Sex Pistols and Absolute Beginners), this movie was a troubled production, with over five months of post-production that led to several scenes and even an entire production number being removed. Due to the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group going out of business, the film went unscreened for over a year.

Three aliens — Mac (Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park), Zeebo (Damon Wayans, The Last Boy Scout) and Wiploc (Jim Carrey, Man in the Moon) notice a broadcast from Earth filled with aerobics and half-naked women. They follow the signal to Earth and the home of Valerie (Geena Davis, The Long Kiss Goodnight), a manicurist who has lost her fiance, Ted (Charles Rocket, who famously said fuck on Saturday Night Live in an era where that would ruin your career). The aliens crash land in Valerie’s pool and when she investigates, she smacks her head against the UFO.

Mac decides to miniaturize her and bring her inside the ship. Why is the ship miniaturized? I’ve wondered the answer to this question for decades. The aliens quickly assimilate Earth culture via TV and get a makeover from Valerie’s best friend Candy (Brown), then go to a nightclub where Mac and Valerie fall in love and Deebo has a long dance battle that defies any description that I can write

Valerie and Mac make love while Zeebo and Wiploc go to the beach with pool boy Woody (Michael McKean, This is Spinal Tap). Through some miscommunication, they end up robbing a convenience store and get arrested, along with Mac and Valerie, who have come to rescue them.

The aliens are taken to Ted’s hospital, where he learns that they are aliens. Valerie and Mac convince him that he’s gone insane and take everyone back to her house, where the aliens prepare to leave for their home planet. Thinking that Mac has picked his home planet over her, Valerie plans on marrying Ted in Las Vegas. Of course, she soon realizes the error of her ways and goes into space to be with her true love.

The soundtrack is rich with the music of the 80’s: Hall & Oates, Information Society, the B-52’s, Depeche Mode, the Jesus and Mary Chain and several songs by Brown, including “Brand New Girl,” “Earth Girls Are Easy” and “Cause I’m a Blonde.”

This is a movie packed with fun. It’s the kind of future that the 50’s thought that the 80’s would be. Throw in an appearance by the “patron saint of Los Angeles” Angelyne and you have a time capsule of the goofier side of MTV era pop culture.

BONUS: Frankenstein and Calamity Jane’s cars from Death Race 2000 and Robby the Robot make cameos in the film, as well as the lectroids from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension!

There’s a scene in A Cat in the Brain where Fulci directs a Nazi orgy like a deranged madman. The results are what opens Sodoma’s Ghost, as a group of Nazi deserters and prostitutes are at play while Willy films the proceedings. Everyone dances to strange jazz music and claps their hands while watching films of the war, then the bombs fall. When you combine this intriguing beginning with a great movie poster, you can see why I picked Sodoma’s Ghost for a 3:25 AM viewing.

Years later, six American students — Mark, Paul, John, Anne, Celine and Maria — are traveling to Paris when they find the house we just saw in the opening. It’s abandoned but fully furnished, and by fully furnished, I mean it’s packed with all sorts of pornography on the walls. And oh yeah. It’s also duly appointed with Nazi ghosts.

Also, there is a flea market here, the Rossi Pop Up Market, that used to be a movie theater. You walk from theater to theater, some of which are turned into stores and some of which I am certain are now places where hoarders live during the week. This Nazi house looks like one of those theaters, with the seats all ripped out and a man in rags ready to surprise you as you search for old DVDs and only find his collection of old bags of Wonder Bread and stacks of old copies of Grit.

Is it politically correct of me to say that I would like to think that sex-crazed Nazis would have had better taste in decoration than this?

Also: It’s 21 minutes into a Fulci film and no one has lost their eye yet.

That night, Anne sleeps alone in a room when the ghost of Willy returns and slaps her around, bloodying her lip. He then licks the blood off and they have the most awkward kiss ever while the worst background music ever created plays and she bleeds all over the place. Evil Nazi ghost Willy is also a worse kisser than Randy West. He makes her confess that she loves it. She then wakes up all alone again, as it was all just a dream.

Every time the kids try to leave, they get stuck. The roads all lead back to the house. The car breaks down. The police station answers with evil voices. The phones are cut. And then they’re locked in the house. As cabin fever sets in, Maria starts to lose her mind.

Mark, drunk and wandering, finds some Nazis playing cards. He joins them only to play Russian roulette for Willy, which he survives and is rewarded with a prostitute. As he starts to touch her, his hands go right through her body and he’s covered with blood. He runs away and sees Paul as a Nazi, then tumbled down the steps to his death.

Maria then is seduced by a prostitute — who is also a ghost — who tries to turn her against her girlfriend Anne, who she claims is cheating with Celine. Speaking of Anne, a possessed version of her tries to get with Paul before turning into a corpse. Sex hijinks amongst friends was never this gory. Or ridiculous.

Paul and John find the film of the Nazis as Mark’s corpse begins to rot. They play the film and just as the ghosts arrive, the bomb drops again and the screen goes to black.

When everyone wakes up, Mark is back alive and it’s all a dream. The teenagers finally drive away, safe from the Nazi menace.

This movie just makes me sad. Anyone but Fulci could have directed it — it’s free from the trademark verve and spark of mania that he brought to films where you expected nothing, like Conquest. It’s rote and boring, with it’s running time feeling way too long. Honestly — any movie packed with Nazi ghosts, sex and violent death should be way more exciting than this.

There are moments in Witchery that approach the madcap goofball lunacy of La Casa 3. But you have to really search for them. Just by looking at the cast — Linda Blair! David Hasselhoff! — you think that you’d be in for a much crazier ride. This has even been titled Ghosthouse II, but make no mistake. This ain’t no Ghosthouse.

An angry mob chases a pregnant woman to a house where she dives from a window, like Oliver Reed in Burnt Offerings. I say like because it’s the exact same shot. Jane (Blair) wakes from this dream, which is never explained.

Don’t worry. This movie has no interest in story. And I don’t mean that in a Fulci kind of way, like an absolute film. No, this movie does the things where you’d expect a story to happen and ignores them.

But hey, let’s talk about our heroes. Gary (Hasselhoff) and Leslie are a couple who have decided to head off to an island to do research on witchcraft. They are there because some weird lights show up on the beach. Also — Leslie is a virgin. That’s right. A virgin. It will be mentioned again. And again. And just when you think it’s been mentioned too many times, it will be mentioned again.

Jane’s younger brother and her parents are all coming to the island too. Her parents want to turn it into a club, so they bring the architect, Linda (Leslie Cumming, in her second straight piece of shit on our site after Robowar) and the realtor’s son.

Oh yeah — this method actress went crazy and haunts the island. She kills the boat captain who brings them there to start before killing off the majority of the cast in ways that echo the seven deadly sins for reasons that are never explained. Yes, things like motivation, the hero’s journey and the three-act structure are all ignored by this film. That’s forgivable if crazy shit happens. Sure, there’s demon sex, but it feels like too little, too late (the most out of context sentence I’ve written in 2018!). There’s also a woman impaled on a swordfish and Hasselhoff getting a blood bukkake, so if you just edit down those scenes into a 3 minute or so supercut, this is a much better film. Like this scene, where Hasselhoff discusses his childhood friend.

What blows my mind is that Tommy — the little brother — has a tape recorder that fits into the plot and it’s totally a Sesame Street model. You’d think they’d want their brand to not appear in a movie where a demon’s penis makes a woman’s vagina start bleeding.

Hey look — any movie where David Hasselhoff gets impaled can’t be all bad. But Witchery sure tries. If only it pushed itself to be as deliriously stupid as Troll 2 or as devoted to gore as, well, take your pick of Fulci haunted house films. But you do get a pregnant and possessed Linda Blair — poor Linda — chasing folks around a house before doing a swan dive to her doom.

The end of this film is a shock ending that has nothing to do with anything that came before. A nurse comes in to tell Leslie that Tommy is fine and so is her baby. She answers, “My baby?” The screen loses color and then a totally 80’s schmaltzy love song plays. Seriously, you gotta hear this shit to believe it. It redeems much of the film.

I watched the ending three times in a day to write this and I couldn’t remember any of it. That should either point to how many movies I watch or how uninspiring this film is. Either way, you can decide for yourself and watch it on Shudder. Or order the double disk of this and the vastly superior Ghosthouse at Shout! Factory.